1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention relate to the field of telecommunications
2. Description of the Related Art
Telecommunications systems, communications capabilities generic to contact center systems and the users that interact with them are continually being developed by adding flexibility in methods of communication. Much development has been focused toward communications with clients who patronize commercial entities that employ centralized or distributed communications services. Many such communications services are operated as contact centers employing a variety of separate and dedicated media channels that are available for communications between patrons and automated systems or Customer Service Representatives. In addition to traditional telephony voice services, multi-party conferencing, text messaging, email, chat, Web co-browsing, message posting, video, and collaborative multi-media applications have been developed to expand the media options for meeting communications requirements.
In many communications applications, multiple media channels are available for accommodating technical capabilities and preferences of clients. Choice of media channels may also be driven by nature/contents of conversation, e.g. long URL can be better transferred via text rather than voice. A problem exists with such applications in that they may be platform dependent and users may have the same application installed on communications end appliances or devices in order to participate. In other applications that use multiple media channels for communications, each channel is dedicated to the single media type used for communications. The media type may be chosen at the beginning of a session and, at least in some circumstance, it may not be reasonable for participants to switch to other media channels during the same session without perhaps losing context of the session.
Some applications have been developed that may allow users to communicate through a specialized communications portal or by leveraging a specialized application that may allow both voice and texting and or co-browsing capabilities in parallel. However, the actual session architecture still employs separate dedicated media channels and the user is dependent on the application or portal, which aggregates the channels through a single interface enabled by the portal or by tools in the application.
Therefore, a system that solves the problems stated above by enabling a communications session with media channel, and in some cases, communications device flexibility in a platform and application independent manner is desired.